I keep getting notified that I should upgrade my newpipe apk to a newer version through a url. F-Droid only has up to v0.25.2 but the latest is v0.26.1.
It's been like that for >1w (the discrepancy), is this usual for F-Droid repos? Or something with my installation is wrong?
Yup, fdroid repo is slower paced probably for stability sake. If you want to keep up with the latest release I recommend using obtainium, it fetches the apk directly from the github.
Version 0.26.1 (and 0.26.0) hasn't been published on F-Droid yet because it couldn't be reproduced (meaning that the app as built by F-Droid wasn't completely identical to the one published by the NewPipe team).
The problem is tracked here: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10746
The main fdroid repo has always been slower and If you take a look at "this week in fdroid" There are a couple of notes about newpipe being out of sync So they are aware of it